Tomorrow's world is next to us.

Almost ten years ago, while I was working on a book about the impact of the exponential development of digital technologies on our civilization (Confucius et les automates. L'avenir de l'homme dans la civilization des machines, Grasset, 2014) I had imagined a "map of the new world" to describe the coming changes. A sort of atlas of the future to orient oneself in a world in upheaval. The objective was to depict the ongoing technological, economic and social reconfigurations that I believed were about to transform our civilization. At the time, I highlighted the emergence of a "seventh continent", that of the cyberspace, entirely private, owned by the digital giants - the GAFAMs and their Chinese cousins, the BATXs - who feed off the data that we produce for them for free. All human activities were called upon to reconfigure themselves around this new continent: between those who exploit the seventh continent and profit from this data on the one hand, and those who are affected by the digital transformation on the other; between the emergence of new opportunities, and the rise of new perils.

Less than a decade later, I realize that everything has gone even faster than I had imagined. The pandemic has accelerated many trends and the tectonic plate movements that were already underway have intensified. So much so that these, initially, imagined territories have taken shape. They are even inhabited by real people, of whom we all know examples around us. I had the desire to revisit this map today, to observe this.

East of the 7th Continent, live the operators, those who design, control, finance, direct, reap profits generated by the machines. In 2014, I imagined them reigning over the 7th continent. A true aristocracy of the work and the world to come, they live in symbolic megacities, at a distance from other workers. If there is one domain where the effect of the pandemic has been clear, it is that of large digital companies, whose supremacy - and that of those who work there - has been further bolstered. The GAFAMs and their Chinese equivalents, the BATXs, have reaped record profits, taking advantage of the explosion of e-commerce, teleworking and, more broadly, of the prominence of screens in our lives in times of confinement. While entire sectors of the economy are collapsing, the GAFAMs have accumulated $929 billion in revenues in 2020.

The operators, these mandarins of the future world, are nevertheless facing a number of challenges. First of all, they have to take the increasing number of cyber-attacks very seriously. The map already indicated an "island of Internet pirates or hackers", a place of all dangers. Today, the number of hackers is growing, and cyber-attacks are multiplying, against companies or public infrastructures. In France alone, they have increased fourfold in 2020. They affect hospitals, logistics and supply chains in all sectors, and their consequences on security could be massive. So much so that NATO has just declared that they should be considered equivalent to armed attacks, thus opening up the possibility of a military response.

And then there are those for whom everything is going well, or even better. South of the 7th continent, the billionaires' rock is home to those who, isolated from the rest of humanity, have accumulated colossal fortunes by benefiting from the rent of technologies and the new "raw materials", data. The power of the capital produced by the 7th continent has been increasing ever since. We could list the ever-increasing amounts of these great fortunes, but the recent competition between Jeff Bezos and Richard Branson to see who will be the first to launch his space rocket seems even more representative of the phenomenon of secession of the super-rich, who are now looking towards other horizons, those of space. From now on, the question is more about who will conquer the new territories!

On the other hand, there are those for whom the digitization of our lives has been synonymous with the loss or degradation of employment, and often of income. I had called the Vast Land of the Quaternary Period this immense territory, whose contours are in movement, and which welcomes all those whose work has been taken over by a software, or whose activity has been profoundly transformed. These people have often exited the wage-earning sector and are developing new forms of employment. The pandemic will accelerate this migration of part of the workforce to this new space. We imagine the Vast Land of the Quaternary Period as a place of precariousness, which it partially is. But it is also a wonderful space for social innovation, where new services are imagined, where artisanal and artistic activities are valued. The boundaries between leisure and work are particularly porous. Gaming is developing at great speed, for reasons that go beyond entertainment. The company World Game, founded by Alexandre Cadain and part of Artificial Intelligence Quartermaster (AIQ), is very representative of this dynamic: it offers games whose goal is to encourage players to find solutions to real-world problems. Legacy, the first game developed by the studio, requires players to progress in the game, not by accumulating resources as in classical games, but by using the resources left by the previous generation, at the previous level. A game that confronts players with the environmental issues posed by a world with finite resources.

And then, finally, there is the world in transition. This is the world of the institutions we still know, of the so-called " traditional " companies, which are evolving without having yet switched to another model. This is the world where questions are being asked: about future business models, about how to retain employees... When we designed this map, " nomadic executives " already appeared to be an issue. Today, a survey of 30,000 American executives conducted by economists from the Universities of Chicago, Stanford and Mexico tells us that less than 30% of them want to return to their workplace full-time, and 20% would like to switch to 100% remote work. Only 5% wanted to make this choice before the pandemic. A new legal and organizational headache is emerging for managers.

Looking at this map again, one realizes that the world that we imagined less than ten years ago is already here. If I had placed the Sea of Wisdom on the map ten years ago, it is because such an acceleration of time challenges us, and we must draw from the thousand-year-old wisdoms the resources to keep the thread of our essential values. But in order to continue to find our bearings, we must also engage in a constant exercise of anticipation. For as the philosopher Elie During rightly says: "The future is not in front of us, but next to us: it is parallel to the present, and already fully active in this dimension. The future is not posterior to the present, it is contemporary to it". To imagine the world of tomorrow is therefore to make it happen already. Hence it is important to cultivate one's imagination as a fundamental ability, for anyone - business leader, activist, artist or scientist - who wants to influence the future of the world or simply to pave their way through life.

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You can explore my map in 3D here www.ownthefuture-rolandberger.com/

You can play World Game’s Legacy game here https://apps.apple.com/us/app/legacy-run-for-life/id1548674528